Pointe-Noire

Pointe-Noire, Republic of the Congo

Pointe-Noire, Congo’s economic capital and home to a quarter of the country’s population, faces recurring challenges as population growth pushes households into flood and erosion-prone areas. More than half of Pointe-Noire’s urban space is occupied by unplanned settlements built from fragile materials. During the rainy season several of these neighborhoods become inaccessible due to flooding. Pointe-Noire has seen disease outbreak from contaminated wells and flooded latrines, and hundreds of residents have been displaced by recent flood events. The city also suffers from landslides due to deforestation and fragile soils. Efforts to reduce the population’s vulnerability to climate related hazards have been inhibited by lack of effective urban planning, limited investment, and inadequate institutional capacity of key stakeholders at the national and local levels. Local Government has limited GIS capacity, and cartographic products of the urban infrastructure are outdated, incomplete, or inaccessible.
The OpenStreetMap data for Pointe-Noire is still relatively empty. Updated georeferenced information would inform and facilitate resilient and inclusive urban planning.
The Open Cities Pointe-Noire project complements the World Bank’s DURQuaP project and Integrating Urban Resilience TA through tool development and capacity building activities in the City of Pointe-Noire. The project will support intermediary outcomes to i) engage counterparts and raise greater awareness of GIS-based planning and governance and ii) increase urban resilience through risk management tools. Specifically, community mapping of exposure and vulnerability in OSM and associated mapping tools will contribute fundamental data layers for i) a basic early warning system for flooding using a GIS-based disaster risk management system and ii) municipal base maps.
The Open Cities Pointe-Noire project will target two flood-prone neighborhoods covered by the DURQuaP project: i) Quartier Mboukou (arroundissement de Tié Tié) and ii) Quartier Tchiniambi (arroundissement de Louandjili). Mapping activities will focus on collecting attributes related to buildings, drainage and roads to help counterparts with management and maintenance. The Municipality of Pointe-Noire will serve as the Open Cities Pointe-Noire project’s primary government counterpart.

Mapping Progress to Date

This section provides an overview of mapping activities in the selected city geographic extent. The Before/After widget below allows comparing current density and distribution of map features with snapshots from previous years. The time chart of OSM editing activity over time offers insights on how many features have been contributed to the map over a specified period.

Data Quality

While OSM coverage keeps increasing, it's important to also understand quality of the data created. The tools available in this section allow for comparing OSM data with other "reference" datasets. These could be, for example, official datasets from government agencies showing distribution of features with those available OSM. The "Gap Detection" widget provides a visual representation of potential gaps in data, by comparing the latest OSM buildings with built-up areas automatically detected from satellite imagery.

OSM Community Dynamics

Understanding mapping progress and data quality also requires looking at the local OSM community and how mappers have contributed over time. Embedded widgets in this sections allow e.g. exploring the list of top mappers who contributed to features within the city extent, with links to their OSM user profile page. A time chart of number of user contributions over pre-defined time periods (daily, weekly, monthly), also provides a picture of how consistent the mapping activity in the area is.